Column: How will Russian manipulation affect the 2020 election? We still have no idea (via latimesopinion)
There’s a much-read copy of the Mueller Report on Sinan Aral’s kitchen table, and the part that’s especially dog-eared is the part about the Russian government’s “sweeping and systematic” interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Part of that is due to a lack of commercial will, the lack of access to data. Part of that is due to a lack of political will, of trying to make these types of things happen. And and our legislatures and our platforms have a lot of important decisions to make in the future on privacy policy, election integrity policy, and in terms of the [social media] platforms, and how they come to understand research and police these types of intervention.
And [then] the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was a clear violation of the terms of service of Facebook by an academic at Cambridge — to share that [Facebook] data with Cambridge Analytica. It has dramatic implications for society, and our ability to understand those implications is also at risk, because the platforms have retracted from an open and transparent approach to analyzing what happened on their platform.
Another privacy obstacle is about voting itself, the secret ballot. How do you get information that would link, say, a misinformation campaign on social media to how someone ends up voting, without compromising those votes? You’re talking about randomizing and aggregating, but does what you’re trying to find out come down to thinking, here’s a voter in Wisconsin who may be seeing Facebook messages that appear to be posted from friends of friends, and you want to know what he’s going to do when he gets into the voting booth — compared to what he might have done without this?
Let me just say upfront that I’m a registered independent, but at the same time I am hearing FBI Director Christopher Wray warn us that the threat just keeps escalating. Not only are Russia’s attacks likely to intensify in 2020 but he’s saying that other countries are entertaining whether to take a page out of that same book.
The first is to assess the message content and reach: how many messages were spread? And try to understand who is exposed to these messages.
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